From Amazon.co.uk
No Good Deed begins with what most thrillers would have as their climax--undercover cop Orla McLeod talks a young boy into cutting her free to fight back as drugs race catastrophically through her system and a colleague is tortured to death in another room. Orla is a woman who keeps her promises, and she promised the child that she would look after him, forever--and this she does, though Hell stands in her way. In this radical break with the intense, but comparably gentle, detective stories with which she started her career, Manda Scott gives us a full range of thriller experiences--brutal noir as the police try to persuade Glasgow's criminals to give up a torturer gang boss of whom everybody is afraid, Buchanesque wanderings through the snow-covered foothills of a remote mountain district and a sense of growing dread as we struggle to understand what made Tord Svensen the vicious killer he is, what Orla will have to learn to defeat him.
No Good Deed is a meditation on vengeance and violence and their costs, and what it means to walk away and make other choices; it is one of the most remarkable thrillers of the year. --
Roz Kaveney
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Det. Insp. Orla McLeod goes undercover in Glasgow's underworld, then heads to the highlands with the nine-year-old boy who saves her life. As the novel opens, Orla is about to become the victim of the infamous gangster who brutally murdered her partner, Luke; her only hope is Jamie, who just saw his mother die and is the only one who can identify the killer. Injured in the crossfire, Jamie is taken by Orla and fellow officer Murdo Cameron to her mother's mountain hideaway to recuperate in the care of Orla's friends. But who are her friends? Someone on her team may be working for the other side and her mother's neighbors may not be what they seem. And even Orla's past including memories of her crusading father's assassination by the Irish villains he tried to put behind bars is not what she thinks it is. Scott's prose suits her tough yet sensitive heroine and her storytelling is equally unflinching. Graphic violence contrasts with wilderness beauty in a thriller that has plenty of touching moments, as when Orla and Murdo manipulate Jamie's computer records to create an artificial family for him. Scott, whose first novel, Hen's Teeth, was a finalist for the Orange Prize, delivers humane characters and supercriminals, romance without sentimentality, and adventure without easy answers. Orla McLeod's American debut ensures that she will take her place in the top ranks of fictional female detectives.
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